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I came across a publisher\subscriber protocol called PubSubHubBub. It is a server-to-server web-hook-based pubsub (publish/subscribe) protocol - an extension to Atom and RSS. Here the parties (servers) get an instant notification when a feed URL, that they are interested in is updated.

Traditionally a subscriber would subscribe to a feed and poll for it at regular intervals, to see if there is an updated feed available. In this protocol rather than polling for a feed, the content is pushed out from the publisher. The theory here is that the subscriber can subscribe to a feed via a 'Hub', which then would inform the subscribers when the feed is updated.

How PubSubHubBub works?A Publisher instead of sending an update to every subscriber, it includes a in its feed URL and sends an update to the Hub.A Subscriber sends a subscription request to the Hub with the feed URL that it is interested in. The request also contains a callback URL to which the Hub should send an update.To ver…

Today when I woke up and switched on the Television to see what's making the news; I heard about Steve Jobs death. For the first time in my life, I'm feeling very sorry for a tech giant who passed away. Steve was an extraordinary human being. He kissed success not just once but many times. He changed the way we experience technology. His charisma, passion and more importantly desperation to do something great is matchless.

One of the key aspects of building web applications that deliver great user experience is to build applications that are highly responsive. Browser vendors are trying to improve the speed of their JavaScript engines and are enabling the web applications to perform well. Since JavaScript was introduced, there has been no way to execute the code outside of the browser UI thread i.e. it has remained single threaded. The Web Workers API introduced in HTML5 enables web applications to run scripts in the background, independent of the UI thread.

The performance of a web application can be greatly improved by using Web Workers since each worker would spawn its own thread. These threads can be used to perform computationally intensive tasks in the background without affecting the performance of the entire application.